King’s Field is a dungeon crawler created by From Software and released in 1994 for Playstation. It was never published in the West.
From this early screenshot, taken from Edge issue 11, we can see that originally the game was called Crystal Dragon:
Another beta pic, shown below, probably taken from a more advanced build, was published in a issue of Console Mania, an italian magazine.
If you have any more info about this game, please let us know!
Wipeout Pulse is a racing game developed by Sony Studio Liverpool for the PSP, sequel to Wipeout Pure.
Before the game was released in late 2007, a promotional UMD was released in both Europe and North America. This contained some material not seen in the final game, the most interesting of which was the AI Race mode.
This was available in the Racebox section of the game, allowing the player to select the track and difficulty of the race between a group of AI controlled vehicles. The D-pad allowed the player to switch the camera between different vehicles, as well as selecting the camaera angle.
As in the final game, the Photo Mode was available, allowing screenshots to be saved to the memory stick.
Post by Edward Kirk
As we can read on wikipedia, Crash Twinsanity is an platform game developed by Traveller’s Tales and published by Vivendi Universal for the PlayStation 2 and the Xbox. It was released in North America on October 2004, while a Nintendo GameCube version was planned but canceled for undisclosed reasons. In the videos below you can see removed and different parts from Crash Twinsanity beta version, as the lost level “Gone a bit coco”. If you can notice more beta differences, please let us know!
Thanks to Retroguy205 for the contribution!
Videos:
The music for the removed level, Gone a Bit Coco, can also be heard in the video below.
Turok 2008 is a FPS for PC, Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 with very stunning and exciting cutscenes. The player takes part in the military operation which occurs on a planet populated with dinosaurs. While it’s a first person shooter, Turok features a lot of third person moments, creating original and unique gameplay experience. It uses Unreal Engine 3. It was developed by Propaganda Games.
PC version of the game’s folders TurokGame\Baked and TurokGame\Live contain beta / unused maps. It’s possible to get the maps to load in game by copying these folders to TurokGame\Content\Maps folder. After that it’s required to remove the .u files from the Baked folder, otherwise the game will not launch.
The beta / unused maps can be loaded from the game console with the open command. Most of them contain only few brushes or a black room, or crash the game. But there are exceptions: developers’ test maps and prototypes of the game content.
L02_06 map contains early version of the jungle. There’s some of the game’s early content.
Lv02_htest and Lv02_c seem to be terrain testmaps.
First three maps shown in the second video are testmaps from TurokGame\Content\TurokDLC1 folder, other two are from Baked. The last one, LV_15_WB, contains very early prototypes of the game content.
RaptorTest map is an early prototype of the jungle.
Third video shows bunch of testmaps from Live folder. One of them contains unused tyrannosaur.
It’s possible to view Turok’s packages with the viewer which you can get here.
Thanks to this program, we can see beta / unused models from the game.
It is also worth mentionning that Nathan Cheever, who was Assistant Lead Level Designer until January 2007 on the game, wrote on his personal website that Turok 2008 had some cut contents during its development:
(…) As you can guess, Turok went through the typical growing pains a new company, team, and title goes through. It was originally a longer, more diverse action game. When I arrived, it was titled Turok: Rebirth. The subtitle was eventually dropped to mark it as a true relaunch of the franchise.
Other changes included reducing most of the vehicle levels, as well as an ongoing companion. Lil was a young survivor Turok had to protect throughout the story, much in the same way Ripley protected Newt in Aliens. Companion AI and gameplay diversity were the reasons she was removed from the final game. You can still dig through the game assets and find her model, however.
The project was a valiant effort for a new, robust FPS experience with a long-standing franchise. The young team, company, and scope of the game was too much at the time to find the right mix to make Turok a high-ranking game. Licensing the Unreal Engine 3 at the time had its own share of woes as well. Disney needed the game released and the team had to make things work within the allotted time.
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